A confused Fortnite player noticed something while playing the popular free-to-play battle royale shooter and posted a screenshot on Twitter. In the shared image, it looked as if a weird picture of mold had popped up in the game. Why was there mold in Fortnite? Turns out, you can blame Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and a decision he made decades ago.
On November 14, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney replied to a player who posted an image on X (formerly Twitter) of Fortnite with what looks like mold in the game’s newsfeed. The person was confused, until Sweeney replied with a fun explanation.
“This is Unreal Engine’s default texture,” tweeted Sweeney. “I imported it into Unreal Engine 1 in 1995 while I was developing on a 90 MHz Pentium. It’s still there and shows up when a programmer forgets to specify a texture.”
When another user asked if the image was mold, Sweeney replied that it wasn’t, and explained the origins of the odd-looking texture.
“It’s a stock photo of cave pearls, a kind of calcium carbonate deposit that forms in limestone caves,” said Sweeney.
When someone asked the all-important question, “Can i eat it?” the CEO replied “Actually yes” and shared a link to the Wikipedia page for Tums, a heartburn medicine that contains calcium carbonate.
If you look around the web, you can find people asking about mold in Fortnite long before this Twitter interaction. People back in 2015 had even figured out the original source of the image already. But it’s still fun to get a direct answer from Sweeney and find out that this mold-like image is—like The Powerpuff Girls or Dexter’s Laboratory—an odd, nostalgic artifact of the 1990s.
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